Former Geelong player Paul Brown opens up on his incredible recovery from shocking one-punch attack
Ex-Geelong player Paul Brown suffered brain bleeding after being in the wrong place at the wrong time six years ago. But he has considered visiting his attacker in jail.
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Paul Brown didn’t stand a chance, despite the dancing feet and impressive closing speed that had served him so well for Geelong in the 1994 and ’95 grand finals.
As the incident that would change the course of his life loomed outside a Shepparton kebab joint in October 2015, he was following the everyday rhythms of regional life.
Basketball for the kids before a quick dash into a chemist while waiting for that kebab on the way to a road trip for a Queensland family holiday.
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How could the 46-year-old 84-gamer and former player welfare manager at Geelong know he was about to be knocked out with the coward punch that would send shockwaves across the tight-knit regional town?
Next Wednesday, Brown’s son Tom will be chosen somewhere in the first 40 picks of the national draft — a torn patella tendon meant his father Paul didn’t hit the 100-game mark that would have guaranteed father-son son status with the Cats.
Different rules allowed daughter Millie to join Geelong as a father-daughter recruit in the AFLW competition.
But, six years on from that fateful night, it will also mark enough time passing for Mooroopna local Brown to feel comfortable speaking about the details of that life-changing incident and the dramatic fallout.
This is no doom and gloom story — anyone who knows the wisecracking talk-your-leg-off Brown is aware he has too much life to live to wallow in pity.
But Brown admits he is only now coming out the other side after the repercussions of a punch that jailed his 19-year-old assailant and subjected the former Cat to months of recovery for a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain.
Brown has battled episodes of depression and has had to give up his role in a Shepparton business because of his methodical recovery but is remarkably forgiving about the nature of the incident.
The young man who hit Brown unprovoked as he walked back into that kebab shop – Mohammad Al Wahame – was eventually sentenced to six years in jail with a non-parole period of four years.
Anyone who knows Brown won’t be surprised that he is prepared to forgive that man, despite the damage he caused.
“I said to my wife one day, ‘I am going to meet this guy in jail’. She said, ‘What would you do that for?’ And I said, ‘He wouldn’t have belted me if he knew me’,” Brown tells the Herald Sun with a raucous laugh.
“A lot of people have said to me they don’t know why it happened or how it happened. I was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But I did ask why for a while.
“The family were playing basketball on a Friday night at the end of October and I went into the kebab shop and ordered.
“I headed across to Chemist Warehouse because I was driving to Queensland with Millie and Tom — and the rest of the family (wife Angela, eldest daughter Meg, younger son Harry) were flying up three days later.
“I came out of Chem Warehouse and crossed the road and you can see the footage of it.
“I walked towards this guy and you could see him mouthing off to me, ‘What the f*** are you looking at?’.
“I don’t remember any of it but you could see my hands go up in the air. It was reported that I intervened.
“Whether I said, ‘Is everything all right?’, because he was fighting with his girlfriend, or just stuck my hands up and said, ‘I have got nothing to do with this’, I don’t know.
“And then bang. It was just a quick punch. And I wasn’t ready for it. You could defend or duck or run. But it all happened so quickly.
“I remember a policeman I know said to me there is no footage of the David Hookes incident but it sounds exactly like that. I got punched and my head hit the ground. Killed him (Hookes), didn’t it?”
Court footage shows Brown’s head smacking into the footpath — the mild-mannered footy coach and supplier of uniforms and engravings through his growing Shepparton business was knocked out cold.
Brown was rushed to Shepparton Hospital with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain, then quickly flown to Melbourne where a tumour was found on his brain as doctors performed intensive scans.
The tumour the surgeons removed was benign — a meningioma the size of a squash ball that was in a drainage point in his brain.
But the recovery from the brain injury required a month in rehabilitation to fix visual issues.
Brown’s full life of football coaching, family responsibilities and helping run a business with a dozen workers was suddenly brought to a halt.
Finally, he is back on his feet after trading in a high-stress business for a local coffee cart.
But if the quick wit and warmth in his voice show he is back on his feet — literally — it has only been through years of hard work.
“I had a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain and when you hear about blokes having concussions, that’s basically what happened,” he says.
“I have had fatigue, some mood swings and changes over the past six years.
“In the early days, I remember snapping at the kids quite a lot. It’s probably only in the last couple of years as I have got better that we have talked about it.
“Ange remembers driving down that night to the emergency department and everyone was like, ‘What is he going to be like?’
“There was a two-year process with insurance because if you lose two legs it’s like, ‘No worries’.
“But with a brain injury, insurance companies say, ‘He’s fine to go back’.
“It was determined I was never in a position to manage 12 people again. With my recovery, if I was in a group of four or five people I was just done.
“I would go out for half an hour or an hour and need to go home to sleep. Brain fatigue is so different.
“I tell people now I could run up a sand hill or mountain but sitting in front of a computer … I tell people now I would take brain fatigue any day instead of physical fatigue.
“When you talk about the black dog, I was put on antidepressants as well. You start questioning. Where am I headed with life? What do I do next? Where are we financially?
“In the end the insurance came through and I have turned it around by saying I am almost grateful it happened because it forced me to slow down. Now I tell people that. Slow down. How much money do you need?”
The coward punch that killed Melbourne teenager Patrick Cronin and put his assailant Andrew Lee in jail for eight years for manslaughter is only the most high profile of so many incidents across the nation in the past few years.
As Brown jokes with his dry wit, it’s hard to have post traumatic stress disorder about an event you cannot remember.
But the anger about his circumstances hasn’t translated into hate for Al Wahame.
He is remarkably sanguine about the man who changed his life.
Those who know Brown well — as the bloke who calls the local radio station with funny voices Coodabeen Champion-style, who was so well liked at Geelong he immediately became the club’s first player welfare boss when his career ended — aren’t surprised.
“He is apparently back in this area. I have been making coffees at the immunisation centre here and there is an ethnic community council here. I got to know a bloke and he must have gone home and googled me and he found out I had played footy and he saw about the coward punch,” says Brown.
“He said to me, ‘I know this guy, I know his brother’. They couldn’t understand why it happened. He was saying that I should write a book. So one day I might meet him.
“But then I stopped and didn’t engage it any further. I said, ‘Do I really need to?’.
“If he walked past me on the street I wouldn’t know his face. So what’s the upside?
“If I do write a book I could get hold of him and have a photo with my arm around him and say: ‘Here he is’.”
Brown has helped fellow sufferers of brain fatigue in the Shepparton area work through their individual challenges and had a standing request from the Epworth’s Dr Peter Larkins to advocate for the dangers of coward punches given the flood of worried parents in waiting rooms who have lost children.
“I probably underestimate how much it did affect my family and what I would be like,” Brown says.
“I am the one telling the story after surviving (a coward punch) but you talk to police and they say people just don’t realise how powerful a punch is.
“It knocked me out and hitting the concrete was the after-affect and that’s where the deaths come from.
“The kid (Cronin) who got belted and it killed him, it’s the shattering of the brain.”
Respected sports medico Larkins is an ambassador for Danny Green’s Stop the Coward Punch campaign and plans to get Brown to next year’s function to tell his story.
“Hooksey was a good mate of mine and the more I got involved I realised how many cases there were each year,” Larkins said.
“The number of people who were assaulted at nightclubs or at the footy each week was scary. There are so many people who had brain injuries or had life-changing experiences, let alone deaths.
“Paul is a great positive story to come through from a coward’s punch assault and so the message is don’t solve a problem by getting into a fight.
“Protect your mates and walk away because the message is if you hit someone they could end up with permanent brain damage.
“There are something like 16-20 deaths a year from coward’s punches. So the message Paul can put out there is think twice before you smack someone.
“You might kill them or cause brain damage and you will have that guilt for the rest of your life.”
The son is like Cat’s star
Before his patella tendon ruptured and eventually curtailed his career Echuca-raised Brown arrived at Geelong as a “six foot one centre half forward” who jokes he became an on-field step ladder for his good mate Billy Brownless and the great Gary Ablett Sr.
When Gary Ayres replaced supercoach Malcolm Blight he found a niche for him on the halfback flank with excellent closing speed and the ability to negate mid-sized and tall forwards.
Son Tom has played only five games this year after a syndesmosis injury but as AFL talent manager Kevin Sheehan says he has real tricks and a huge upside.
“We have only seen him five times but he might have a little bit of Tommy Stewart about him,” Sheahan said yesterday.
“We would love to see him show he has it overhead but at ground level he’s got real power, he has lateral movement and some real excitement breaking lines …. He just steps through them as if they are not there at times.”
Brown says his Murray Bushrangers son, who boarded at Geelong College on a scholarship, has finally married talent with belief.
“I coached Tom early on and in primary school he was that perfect ruckman, a kick behind play. If he plonked himself there he was going to mark it and I would say I need you to win the game, not stop the other team.
“Only this year (former Sydney Swan) Mark Brown who coaches him at the Bushies said ‘where do you think Tom’s best position’ and I said, ‘it’s about time you guys asked. It’s half back’.
“For the handful of games they played him there they could see he could read the play, was a good kick and was quick off the mark. He’s taking the game on a bit which he didn’t do as a kid.”
Brown jokes Tom is a great overhead grab because of his practice marking mum Ange’s backyard floaters in a family rounded out by Meg, 23, Millie, 20, Tom, 18, and Harry, 15.
Harry is in the local football academy and the Year 9 student is already 196cm so scouts will monitor his coming seasons, given the family pedigree.
Millie was able to play with Geelong, given AFLW father-daughter eligibility requires a father to have played only one game.
Brown still has a video of Millie and Tom as very young kids bedecked in Geelong gear marching out of the laundry sliding door as if it were a crepe banner to play backyard footy.
Millie is Steve Johnson, Tom channelling Tom Harley (of course), and dad is in his Geelong kit as well as the pied piper until it ends in tears when Tom cops a ball in the face.
Having grown up dominating Tom in the backyard, Millie thrived at Geelong but, this year, will take a season off to concentrate on her university studies in Melbourne.
While Tom would be able to earn nearly $200,000 in his first season if he was a first-round pick playing 20 games, the majority of AFLW players on a list in 2022 will be paid $20,237 with the maximum salary $37,155 for only two players.
As a protective father, Paul can’t wait for the day when the AFLW is truly professional and women don’t have to choose between football and an alternate career.
“Millie started footy in prep and just loved it and made the Vic country side a year or two before she got to Geelong,” he says.
“She is on the inactive list this year. She really wants to concentrate on her studies which is a reflection of the fact for those girls who really want to make a career of it (in AFLW), it’s financially not there yet.
“She was injured a bit last year and Geelong said we can put you down as inactive and then you can decide at the end of next year to get back into it.’’
Geelong is one of many clubs to show interest in Tom but as long as he gets a start somewhere both father and son would be happy.
“It was great for Millie to go to Geelong. Now with Tom going through it, you think how good was Gary Ablett Jr to live in the shadow of his dad and then create something new. It was phenomenal. So Tom has said I don’t care where I go, and I said, ‘That’s all right then’.”
Originally published as Former Geelong player Paul Brown opens up on his incredible recovery from shocking one-punch attack
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